Europa Blues

38

IT WAS HIGH summer in Stockholm, the sun low in the unusually deep blue sky. And yet this time, it wasn’t at all as though an opera scenographer had tried to imitate nature.

It may not quite have been nature, but at least it was more like nature than before.

Than it had been a few weeks before.

Nature is the terribly awful truth.

The last time Paul Hjelm had been on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö, he had enjoyed a long, deep and open-hearted conversation with Leonard Sheinkman’s son. Though in actual fact, Leonard Sheinkman’s only son had died, right there, twenty years earlier. The man he had spoken to wasn’t Leonard Sheinkman’s son at all. He was the mass murderer and Nazi Anton Eriksson’s son. He was a Jewish man named Harald Sheinkman who now needed to be brought up to date about the whole sorry state of affairs.

About the fact his father was a Nazi, not a Jew.

About the fact his father was an executioner, not a victim.

About the fact his father hadn’t written the yellowed pages of that diary, but stolen it and used it to build a background for himself.

About the fact his father had managed to cause the worst pain imaginable by experimenting on guinea pig after guinea pig in a nightmare cellar in Weimar.

About the fact his father had murdered women and children.

How far did the limits of atonement really stretch?

The Pain Centre.

Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue streamed through the old Audi. That was precisely how Paul Hjelm felt.

Kind of Blue.

He said: ‘What is it you’re going through?’

Kerstin Holm turned to look at him.

Her own crisis had stopped short. The Erinyes were dominating her thoughts now. They didn’t leave room for much else.

They dealt out justice, their very own kind of justice. One which consisted of revenge – no more, no less. They took revenge on behalf of unavenged injustices.

So what exactly distinguished them from state-sanctioned death penalties?

She didn’t know. At times, they seemed almost fascistic. At times, rightful avengers. Sometimes, they were nothing more than terrorists. Sometimes, they were repressed but utterly vital mythical forces.

One thing was clear: the Erinyes would never become Eumenides. They would never allow themselves to be neutralised by the lightweight society in which they lived.

Because that was what life in the West was – lightweight: easily lived, easily digested, easily fucked. The unbearable lightness of being. An all-American Existence Light. Filled with chemical sweetener that killed infinitely more quickly than real sugar ever did.

That was the essence of her crisis. Her… metamorphosis. Even if the word did seem slightly grand. Pretentious, even – and if there was one thing no one wanted to be, it was pretentious. That was where everyone drew the line.

The thing she was searching for was the free zone, that place where the primitive forces had free rein to bubble away undisturbed. That bubble we never fail to pop before it gets too big. The one she could feel the virtual presence of every time she sang with the choir, allowing her voice to rise up towards the high vaulted ceilings and letting the choir’s tones surround her like a warm, comforting embrace. Religious? Mmm. But without a sense of the holy, our sense of the unholy also withers away. And we need to retain that. Otherwise we die.

That was roughly how it was. But how best to phrase it?

Maybe something like this:

‘It’s a bit tricky to explain. But don’t worry. I’m just brooding, causing myself grief.’

Paul Hjelm chuckled. ‘Story of my life,’ he said.

They were silent for a moment. The distance between them wasn’t especially big. There were no watertight doors keeping them apart. It was all leaking through. No, it wasn’t possible to understand someone else completely. But what about yourself?

So what, as Miles Davis was playing.

The image in each of their minds was, at least, the same. Hultin’s whiteboard. First, five names. At the bottom, the two who had fled the Ghiottone and Odessa together with Magda in August 1997. Above, three upper-case names in red: Magda Kouzmin, Magda Sheinkman, Elena Basenow. Three names, one woman. Alongside it, an e-fit image put together by Arto Söderstedt and Ernst Herschel. Arto had, in the strictest confidence, told them he suspected Herschel would find it easier to describe her vagina than he did her face, but they managed to put a picture together regardless. A picture of a face and nothing else. They had shown it to Adib Tamir too, and he had confirmed it. That was what she looked like, the bitch who cut Hamid in two.

Arto Söderstedt was fine. He was missing four teeth, wearing peculiar-looking braces and only able to sip Vin Santo through a straw. He was also talking quite strangely. But otherwise, he seemed happier than ever.

It looked doubtful he would ever come home again.

Next to the e-fit of Magda were four photographs, or rather three more e-fits and one proper photograph. They still had just one of the other Erinyes on film, and that was the woman with the mobile phone in Gdynia. Two were the e-fits that Jadwiga from the M/S Stena Europe had composed, and the third had been put together by a salesman from a superstore in Bromma to which Jorge, with great finesse, had managed to trace the red-and-purple-striped rope. The salesman could remember selling it to a woman dressed in black. He had assumed she was an Eastern European working girl and started hitting on her. She had paid in the form of 120 kronor and a kick to the groin. That was why he remembered her so well, and she was none of the four they knew of. That meant she was likely one of those who had taken part in the hangings in Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen. In Palazzo Riguardo too, in all probability.

Suddenly, the kick to the groin seemed almost gentle. Practically a caress.

There they hung in any case, five sharp female faces with a slight Slavic look to them.

All unidentified apart from Magda Kouzmin.

Europe was now on the hunt for them, and it was all their fault.

The A-Unit’s fault.

Neither Paul nor Kerstin were quite sure it was a good thing.

This was a case where plenty of guilty parties had been identified but not a single one had been arrested. Time had somehow set itself right, though; it had caught up with itself. And Jan-Olov Hultin looked fit as a fiddle. Not a stroke in sight. No black hole in the space-time continuum. A newly found sense of clairvoyance, perhaps, but they could live with that. Even Hultin.

They had finally had a response from the phone company in Ukraine. The phone from Odenplan had, on a number of occasions, made calls to two different numbers in Milan. Sometimes they had been to Palazzo Riguardo, presumably threatening calls, and sometimes to a nearby hotel room, where it wasn’t entirely implausible to imagine a couple of the Erinyes sitting and waiting, mapping out di Spinelli’s entire life. Aside from that, a large number of calls to and from Slagsta. Nothing else of interest.

‘Should we go in then?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘Should we go in and ruin Harald Sheinkman’s life just as he’s starting to get back on his feet?’

It was their job.

They both looked up at the beautiful house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Before them, they could see a man without a nose practically skipping up to the house, brushing the roses with his hands and breathing in the scents of the garden through the hole he had in the place of a nose, before reaching its handsome front door and saying to himself: ‘To think that Pappa did so well when I did so badly. But now, now my life’s wounds will heal. As soon as I’m reunited with Pappa, who I loved when we lived in Berlin, who comforted me every night in the terrible Buchenwald. Then I’ll return to Odessa and take Magda from that awful orphanage where everyone becomes an addict or a whore, and we’ll move here to beautiful Sweden, and finally become a proper family again.’

Just a few seconds later, he was dead.

Should Anton Eriksson really be allowed to ruin his own child’s life too? Posthumously?

‘Like hell,’ said Kerstin, doing up her seat belt.

‘What about the truth?’ Paul asked, doing the same.

‘Enough’s enough.’

Paul Hjelm laughed, turned the ignition key and swung out onto Bofinksvägen.

Anton Eriksson could remain the man he had spent half his life believing he was. Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.

The Nobel Prize candidate.

Hopefully he had, somehow, reconciled with his falsified life before he died.

Paul Hjelm accelerated and turned up the volume.

It was how they felt. Exactly how.

Kind of Blue.